"Spiritual truth
is not something elaborate and esoteric,
it is in fact profound common sense. When you realize
the nature of mind, layers of confusion peel away. You
don't actually "become" a buddha, you simply cease,
slowly, to be deluded. And being a buddha is not being
some omnipotent spiritual superman, but becoming at last
a true human being."

~Sogyal Rinpoche
posted by Gill Eardley to Allspirit

Take
someone who doesn't keep score,
who's not looking to
be richer, or afraid of losing,
who has not the
slightest interest even
in his own
personality: He's free.

- Rumi

Version by Coleman Barks
"Open Secret"posted to Along the Way

Self-liberate Even the
Antidote

In case you thought you understood
"Examine the nature of unborn awareness," let go even
of that understanding, that poise, that security, that sense of
ground. Let go even of the idea of emptiness, of openness, of
space...so whenever you come up with a solid conclusion, let the
rug be pulled out. You can pull out your own rug, and you can
also let life pull it out for you.

So if you think that everything is
solid, that's one trap, and if you change that for a different
belief system, that's another trap. We have to pull out the rug
from under our belief systems altogether. We can do that by
letting go of our beliefs, and also our sense of what is right
and wrong, by just going back to the simplicity and the immediacy
of our present experience, resting in the nature of alaya.

Egos clash.
That's the nature of egos.
Treat these outbursts as sneezing fits.

~Hugh Prather in "Spiritual Notes to Myself"

--gill

here's
another from him:

"Letting people in is largely a matter of
not expending the energy to keep them out."

--ts

posted to Allspirit

"It's
as if you had vast, unlimited space
-complete openness, total freedom, complete
liberation -and the habit of the human race is to
always, out of fear, grasp onto little parts of
it.

And that is called ego and ego is grasping on
to the content of our thoughts.
That is also the root of suffering, because there is something in
narrowing it down which inherently causes us a lot of pain
because
it is then that we are always in a relationship of wanting or not
wanting.

We are always in a struggle with other people, with
situations, even with our own being.
That's what we call stress.

That's what we experience as continual, on-going stress. Even in
the
most healthy, unneurotic of us, there's some kind of slight or
very
profound anxiety of some kind,some kind of uneasiness or
dissatisfaction.

When Trungpa Rinpoche came to the West and was teaching in the
early
days in Vermont at what used to be called Tail of the Tiger (now
Karme Choling), he used to tell the students: 'Just sit and let
your
mind open and rest- let yourself be completely open with an open
mind, and whenever you get distracted and find yourself thinking-
in
other words when you are no longer fully in the present and
are
carried away- simply just come back again to resting your mind in
an
open state.'"

I remember a short
conversation between the Buddha and a philosopher of his time. I
have heard that Buddhism is a doctrine of enlightenment. What is
your method? What do you practice every day? We walk, we eat, we
wash ourselves, we sit down. What is so special about that?
Everyone walks, eats, washes and sits down... Sir, when we walk,
we are aware that we are walking; when we eat we are aware that
we are eating.... When others walk, eat, wash, or sit down, they
are generally not aware of what they are doing. -- Thich Nhat
Hanh, Zen Keys